


Double Edged

by castle



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, Strider's Edge AU
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2011-11-27
Updated: 2011-11-27
Packaged: 2017-10-26 15:01:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,703
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/284627
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/castle/pseuds/castle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Wherein John Egbert speaks, and fires his weapon exactly twice.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Double Edged

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Strider's Edge](https://archiveofourown.org/works/225382) by [paraTactician](https://archiveofourown.org/users/paraTactician/pseuds/paraTactician). 



### Part One

War in the age of nuclear weapons is a curious thing.

It is either practised in a playful, exuberant style, when superpowers decide, for whatever reason, to crush a smaller nation. (United States v. Korea, United States v. Vietnam, United States v. Panama, United States v. Iraq, Alternian Empire v. The Planet Earth) Or it is an extended, gruelling, knife-fight-in-a-closet kind of thing between two equally matched nations. (Israel v. The Arab World, Iran v. Iraq, Pretty Much All Of Africa)

But when two states that are either nuclear-armed, or can plausibly claim that their bigger, meaner friends will step in, decide to Rumble, as it were; War achieves the elusive third state, that of Farce. Lots of loud, symbolic gestures, shoes pounding against tables; but very few tank columns pouring over borders, since any meaningful progress results in cities turning into mile-wide puddles of radioactive glass.

So, when Troll Pentagon, (A rather inapt name for a collection of hardened bunkers, I thought, apparently named after an American office building destroyed in the invasion) disappeared inside a very large fireball on the morning of October 3rd, you knew that something very unusual was going on, and that a lot very serious men had been working very, very hard recently.

The Trolls were a star-spanning empire, and Earth didn't even have a unified planetary government, much less a space navy. Ordinarily, a war between a species with cheap spaceflight and one that was mostly groundbound would more resemble a steamroller running over an anthill than actual "combat"; but fortunately for the humans, Her Imperious Condescension considered civil disputes to be beneath the attention of the Navy. As long as there was a purple-blood left in command at the end, the occasional civil war was merely an outburst of high spirits.

So, the Hemospectrum Conservatives, who used orbital bombardment to such great effect during an invasion, were denied this tool. After the first few hours of the civil war, they didn't have any suborbital troopships either. This was strike one.

Strike two: Modern warfare is mostly the business of moving enormous amounts of materiel from place to place, occasionally using it to kill people. The movement of fighting men, their food, fuel for their vehicles, and ammo for their weapons is enormously, hideously complex. You can live off the field, if you don't care much for the civilians, but turbine parts and machinegun barrels don't grow on trees. The decapitation strike against the Troll Pentagon actually left most of the high command alive, but completely wiped out their logistics corps, and removed their ability to fight as a cohesive force.

Strike three: Their civilization, the entire structure of their society, was geared towards producing _exemplary warriors._ And indeed, there was no such thing as a fair fight between a human and a highblood. A human had to have at least sixty pounds and a foot of height advantage on a highblood to even begin to stand a chance.

Exemplary warriors, poor soldiers.

The strength of your arm matters not at all when you're using a rifle. You have to _cooperate_ to fight as a squad, which was something that trolls were generally terrible at. We spent a lot of time calmly shooting trolls who were bravely charging at us to engage in hand-to-hand combat. Again, behavior that had worked well for hundreds of years when fighting natives demoralized and scattered by orbital bombardment, but was profoundly ineffective without it.

And strike four! They were vastly outnumbered, scattered across the planet, and splintered in factions. We didn't even have to fight _all_ of the trolls, just the least cooperative ones.

This was the only possible way a war could be conducted, of course. A slave rebellion _would_ bring fire from the sky. We couldn't throw them off the planet entirely, just maneuver a sympathetic royal into position.

Even so, Feferi was almost more than we could have asked for. Were it not for the extraordinary richness of her blood, her ideas on how subordinate races should be treated would be considered heretically liberal.

Four strikes against them, and they still almost won.

I set down the chair, sat in it, and studied the noble. He was of the class that wore face paint, and it was fearsome indeed, doing very little to conceal an enormous, poorly healed scar that spanned the entire width of his face.

He was eerily calm, in stark contrast to the writing, spitting monster that had been carried in. He lay on the floor, arms and legs cuffed together, then chained separately, then tied to a fire sprinkler standpipe as well as a enormous concrete block that had been wheeled in. Perhaps an excess of prudence, but I could hardly blame Brennan for that.

Capturing highbloods alive was almost always more trouble but it was worth, but alas, orders were orders, and Major Olivette seemed to be of the impression that I might be able to extract some information from a captive officer.

"Some good news, Private Jensen will be going home today. He can hardly fight a war with one arm, after all."

The troll smiled, slowly, revealing rather a lot of teeth, reminding me uncomfortably of Terezi. I changed the subject. "That's quite the scar. One of us?"

"No. A rustblood girl with a knife. I gave her a free shot, but she didn't quite have the guts to go all the way. She thought that it would. Scare me, I think. Funny."

He paused.

"You know, 'rape' is a human innovation. Hatesex is similar in some ways, but not quite the same. We've observed coercive impregnation in the animal species, but the troll reproductive system doesn't work the same way. To _take_ a female, and _force_ her to bear your grubs. it's rather perverse, is it not? I've tried it, but it doesn't quite work."

"Lovely. Oh my, where are my manners? I neglected to introduce myself. Duke Gamzee Makara, I am Second Lieutenant John Egbert."

His smile faded.

"Yes, quite. I've been ordered by my superior officer to interrogate you so that we may gain valuable military intelligence. This is because Major Olivette is a Sandhurst graduate, and therefore falls into certain patterns of thinking. He believes that you have a _plan_ , and if I interrogate you, I will _learn_ this plan, and thus act more effectively in the upcoming battle. This is wrong, of course. Even if you would tell me anything, which you won't, there's simply nothing to tell. There is no grand, strategic plan. You're just fighting, because that's what subjugglators do, and because it is not yet obvious that you have lost."

Gamzee wasn't quite keeping up. "I will tell you nothing."

I drew my sidearm. "I don't care."

A pause. I sat back in the chair, and looked at the Glock in hand.

"You know, if I had done this, here, the whole war would have been prevented. Just shot Dualscar's heir as soon as I met him. Or even after he murdered Sollux. Rein in David's impulse for the melodramatic and just have some chav beat his skull in with a brick, stick his body in a barrel, fill it with concrete and go drop it in the North Sea. It would have saved _tens of thousands_ of lives, preserved our strained, unnatural peace for another decade."

_"Release me."_

I blinked.

There had been rumors that the highbloods could control lesser castes through sheer will alone. It didn't work on humans, of course, and whatever influence they exerted on rustbloods that wasn't learned submission was impossible to learn without the kind of proper, double blinded test that the highbloods would never agree too.

I could have sworn though, in this moment, that it was real. The stare of the troll was absolutely piercing, and I found himself absentmindedly reaching for where the keys would be on my belt... if I hadn't handed them to the guard... on the other side of the locked door. I had done this because I am not entirely stupid, and carrying keys into a prisoner's cell was a stupid thing to do.

So I fired a round into the tile above his head.

"No."

Private Carson stuck his head through the doorway, and I waved him off. Amazingly, the troll had barely reacted at all. He had blinked at the impact, and that was about it.

"Something you should know, Duke. The Queen we serve conveyed her wish to High Command, then communicated to me _personally,_ a move both highly unusual and highly significant; her desire that I should only use violence as a last resort. She wanted me to convince you, Duke Makara, to turn you to our side."

I chuckled. The troll did not seem to find it funny.

"Absolutely impossible, of course. Even if I pulled it off, you would still be a dangerous influence, a lurking tumor in the body politic. And when you finally turned malignant, removing you in a time of peace would be a... messy, unpleasant affair, costing lives and burning political capital. Better to cut the tumor out now, during the greater confusion of a civil war. A quick short, sharp shock, a handful of conservatives vanishing in the chaos. Maybe they killed themselves, maybe they were murdered by radicals, human or troll, maybe they fled across the ocean, hiding the color of their blood. Maybe they built a rocket, and flew to the Moon!"

"Nobody knows, because no bodies will be found, and no witnesses will be left."

My eyes drifted to the concrete block. "The idea of 'plausible deniability' seems to have been unknown to Alternian civilization before you came here, and your people still seem to have problems grasping it. The idea of concealing a fact from a leader for their _own good,_ rather than simple treachery, seems foreign to your way of thought, yet another example of your species' inability to run a proper bureaucracy. All for the good, better that our Queen think of me as a simple troubleshooter, without staining her hands with just how that trouble is shot."

My tone grew more formal. "But you _must_ understand, Duke, Humanity has only ever served the Alternian Empire with _loyalty._ It is distressing that our rulers have had this difference of opinion, but I believe I have acquitted myself fairly. I serve our Queen, and for her good, you must die."

Now we had some emotion. He hissed in rage, literally too furious to speak. I watched his chains with some interest. If they were going to break, it would be now.

Nope.

I sighed. Look at me, taunting a dead man. A prank gone rather too far, one that needed to end.

"Any last words? No? Okay."

The gun kicked.

I stood, and watched circulatory fluid leak from the rapidly cooling piece of meat on the floor.

The circumstantial simultaneity of the situation, another one of Doc Scratch's phrases, struck me. A highblood, standing over the body of a rustblood. And now a human, standing over the body of a highblood. I probed my feelings carefully, like poking at the edge of a half-buried landmine with a stick.

Another killing. Did I feel sadness? Relief? Vindication? Anger?

Nothing. I felt nothing at all.

I knocked on the door, and Carson let me out. I looked past Sergeant Brennan to see several of my men with rifles aimed. I nodded in satisfaction at their preparation. I turned to Brennan.

"The highblood didn't know anything useful. Burn the body, and dump the ashes in the river."

### Part Two

Sergent Brennan joined me as I walked back to the convoy. I glanced at him.

"You're perhaps wondering why we bothered capturing the highblood at all, if I was just going to shoot him, something that could have been done more easily, and quickly, in the field; and wouldn't have cost Jensen an arm."

Brennan was a man of few words, and much action. He demonstrated the first by remaining silent.

"It bloody well is the year 2020, Sergeant. Jensen will get a medal, a new robot arm; and once limb regeneration makes it out of the laboratory, a _meat_ one, ah ha ha."

Loud silence.

"We had our orders, we carried them out." No need to say aloud that there were certain orders we quietly forgot. Might as well add a baldfaced lie... "And the Duke let slip rather more than he had intended."

"Really?"

"Yes, Sergeant."

"Huh."

Silence.

"Something else on your mind?"

"The troll, sir."

Ah. And not the dead one, I'd warrant.

I had very little _practical_ experience with the composition of various different combat teams, yet the premise was obvious. For guarding a base, you would pick one group of men. For operating behind enemy lines, you would pick another. And for fighting a guerrilla war, killing small groups of an ethnic minority, in utmost secrecy, you needed a third kind.

The men in my platoon all had excellent, very personal reasons for wanting to see trolls dead. Most of them were murderers. Two actually had been on the run from the Legislacerators, for multiple months, which was enough for instant field promotion, once I learned of it.

Essentially, I ran a platoon of heavily armed racists, a modern-day Waffen-SS. I felt a certain amount of ambivalence about this, as you might expect. My men weren't quite Aryans, but if nothing else, they were Human.

Then there was 'John Smith'.

John had the gray skin of a troll, but, oddly enough, no horns. As it turned out, this is because he cut them off, then ground the stumps flush to his skull. (He wore a hat at all times, the flat red disks of his horn-stumps appearing to be rather ghastly open wounds.)

The reason he had done such a thing, then joined an all-human death squad led by one of the war's most notorious rebels, was complicated. Should you get him drunk enough, and also happen to be his commanding officer, you could draw the long, unhappy story out of him.

There was a girl of astonishing beauty and unmatched virtue, a number of vile bluebloods whose opinions on miscegenation he disagreed with, and a number of virtuous friends, whose honour was beyond question and positive qualities were uncountable. (Despite being, if you read between the lines, mostly drug dealers, street soldiers, and various other petty criminals.) By the end of the story, there was also quite a lot of dead people.

It was rather uncomfortably similar to my own past in a number of places; with the notable exception that Smith had killed most of his enemies himself. He had emerged from the charnel-house that his life had become with the conclusion that every troll with blood higher than his on the hemospectrum was inherently untrustworthy, and should be culled sooner, rather than later.

"Has he given you any reason to suspect him of disloyalty?"

"Well, no, sir."

"He's a fine soldier, and he has just as much reason to hate trolls as you do. Perhaps more." I paused. "Do you know why neo-Nazis get face tattoos?"

"Nosir?"

"They're certainly not attractive, they more or less completely disqualify you from the job market, and they definitely limit your potential social group. And _that is the point._ A Nazi facial tattoo is what is referred to as a 'costly social signal'; it signals an individual's extraordinary dedication to the group by virtue of being very, very expensive to get, in multiple ways, as well as being almost completely permanent. And Private Smith has _cut off his horns!_ This is so costly a signal in Troll society as to be completely unknown, like a human cutting off one of their own arms. It's not even done as a punishment, because a troll without horns isn't a troll at all. That's how much Smith hates his own species."

"Yessir."

"In conclusion, you don't have to like him, but you do have to fight with him. Now shut up and soldier, soldier."

"Yessir."

"Oh, and Sergeant?"

"Yes sir?"

"Make _sure_ the highblood's horns are burned. I want no souvenirs taken."

"Ah... yessir."

**Author's Note:**

> There were 3,000 words of author's notes here, but I deleted them, since they were incredibly indulgent and unnecessary.


End file.
